Burlington residents scrambled Tuesday to load up on groceries, driveway salt and generators before the forecast winter weather hits today. While grocery stores managed to keep the bread and milk stocked, most hardware stores were already out of salt by Tuesday morning.

The Lowe’s on Huffman Mill Road had run out of the ice melt two days prior, Home Depot was out, and the rumor was that BJ’s Wholesale Club was the only store in the county that had any left.

“I think everybody in the area is out of ice melt,” said Tammi Venable, Home Depot store manager.

She said, “We do have rock salt,” which is used in home water filtration systems, but Venable didn’t recommend using it as ice melt.

“It’s not made for snow,” she said, explaining some of the chemicals in the rock salt ruins concrete.

But she’d seen customers purchase the product as last-ditch efforts to clear driveways in past snowstorms.

Home Depot was also sold out of snow shovels as of Tuesday afternoon.

“We pulled down what we had this morning,” Venable said.

By noon, the shovels, propane cylinders for heaters and heaters themselves were sold out, she said.

“We have Duraflame logs, and we have sand out front” for customers needing traction for their vehicles, Venable said.

In addition to salt, Lowe’s saw customers flocking to the seasonal department to purchase generators.

A department employee said the generators ran from about $430 to $1,000, and most people buy them during snowstorms to back up refrigerators and keep food fresh when the power goes out.

Whether that will actually happen remains to be seen, said Randy Wheeless, spokesman for Duke Energy.

Wheeless said Duke Energy has its own team of meteorologists based in Charlotte, which tries to predict power outages based on expected precipitation.

And they’re not concerned as much with snow as with other types of precipitation, he said.

He said freezing rain is what damages power lines and trees since it coats them, freezes and becomes heavy, causing them to fall.

In the event that power lines are knocked down during this week’s winter storm, Wheeless said, extra Duke Energy crews are standing by and ready to be deployed. He said 150 workers from Ohio and Kentucky have already been moved to Greensboro.

“They will be kind of ready to go in different directions,” Wheeless said. “It could be Burlington, it could be Winston-Salem.”